This piece was originally published on Carter Moon’s substack on November 6, 2025.
This past Saturday a community teach-in was held at Mar Vista Gardens, one of the last public housing projects here on the Westside of LA. It’s a remarkable place, with 601 apartments for low-income families, and beautiful grounds with lots of green space. Built in 1954, the complex is a reminder that at one point this country actually built housing that meets people’s needs rather than treating it as investment assets. It’s exactly the kind of complex LA needs many more of, particularly here on the Westside where rents are absolutely astronomical.
Mar Vista Gardens is predominantly Latino and has been hit hard by the Trump administration’s racial terror campaign that’s been waged on LA this year. Luckily, our local rapid response network and the community organization People Organized for Westside Renewal have done what they can to get people groceries as they struggle to work safely, but the pressures on these families have been devastating.
To make things worse, Housing and Urban Development is trying to evict undocumented people as a means of punishing them for “taking” resources from “real” Americans. They tried doing the same thing during Trump’s first term in 2019, and it only failed due to record-setting public comment pushing back. The rule would impact 25,000 families nationwide and one in five families in LA’s public housing system. Technically speaking, citizen family members would be able to stay in their housing, but the splitting up of families and leaving them without the income of an undocumented family member will effectively mean they’re kicked out of their housing as well.Subscribe
The Housing Authority of the County of Los Angeles has said that if this many families leave public housing at the same time, the entire system will collapse since their rent income will evaporate with them. Undocumented actually pay more in rent in public housing units because they don’t qualify for benefits, so HACLA is dependent on their overpayments to stay solvent. As bad as things are now, they stand to get much, much worse.
The teach-in was an opportunity to alert the community of this looming crisis and hear testimony from women who live in Mar Vista Gardens and its sister housing project from the San Gabriel Valley who will be impacted by this rule change. These are women who not only devote themselves to being caretakers of their families, but volunteer intensely and serve their communities. They are people who have contributed more to the wellbeing of Los Angeles than Stephen Miller ever will. They’re people who have been in LA for decades, much longer than I have. As I sat and listened to them explain their distress at this potential rule change, my heart absolutely shattered for them. We, as a city, and frankly as a country, have to do everything in our power to make sure these families stay in their homes.
Of course, Republicans just despise public housing and the very concept that governments have an obligation to provide anything to the poorest among us. They are proudly a death cult of anti-empathy. This is plainly an attempt to round up and deport undocumented people even more easily, or terrorize them into self-deporting, a major tactic DHS has been relying on. They would also love nothing more than for the entire public housing system to collapse in LA so that they can trap low-income people in a privatized nightmare that extracts the maximum rent possible from people who live below the poverty line.
The war on public housing has been waged for two generations now, and it’s largely been bipartisan, even if Republicans have been the tip of the spear. (To learn more about the destruction of public housing and its devastating impacts, I really recommend Jacob Woocher’s impressive series on the subject.) I can easily foresee a future where Democrats “compromise” and sacrifice mixed-status families being forced onto the streets in order to get some inadequate concessions in return. It’s exactly the kind of “tough on immigration” bullshit they’ve tended to lean into that results in unbelievable harm to immigrant communities.
Luckily, there is a lot we can do to protect our neighbors here. There is an ambitious plan that POWER is part of an organizing campaign to get 60,000 people to submit public comment opposing this rule change. Ideally these largely need to be physical letters that Housing and Urban Development has to open and sort through, rather than internet comments that can easily be ignored. This will take a substantial organizing effort; in 2019 there were 30,000 comments submitted and this time we need to double it. There’s a lawsuit being filed to block the rule change as well, but we’re really going to need all hands on deck to show public outrage over this issue. The comment portal will open in the coming weeks and I really need you, the person reading this right now, to write a letter to HUD when it does.
I know writing public comments to HUD isn’t as sexy and exciting as confronting ICE directly, but this rule change should be understood as every bit as threatening to our immigrant neighbors as the fascist thugs invading our communities. And this rule change doesn’t just impact LA, although we’re likely to feel this the hardest. If you live anywhere in the country, you should oppose this. Please take a moment to write your comment here so that you can be reminded to send a letter when the comment portal opens.
This rule change comes in combination with the Trump administration’s unspeakable disruption of SNAP benefits due to the government shutdown, putting 40 million people on the brink of desperate hunger. The all-out war against poor people is being waged by a fascist funded by our billionaire oligarch class. The only response to this is unwavering solidarity, doing our part to get food into people’s stomachs and to stop our neighbors from being evicted. (If you live in LA, I recommend donating to Food for Comrades and Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid.)
I know it’s easy in these moments to give in to powerlessness and despair, but we truly cannot afford to in this moment. As the brilliant Kelly Hayes wrote recently: “There are living, breathing people all around you who need your sense of decency to be made material. Don’t give up on them, or on you.” When we really need to, we are capable of digging deep for other people’s survival, and I know you are too.
